We spent some our time bugfixing and improving the combat. We ironed out some rare bugs (looping AI, freezes, crashes), along with some minor ones, and we are working hard on making a good target selection for the AI, especially in group combats. We are also working on group communication and combat awareness of the NPCs. We also added a bonus to range when attacking from different floors, so beware of the archers in the towers!

We practically removed the loading screens from Teron, so the game will provide a seamless experience instead of being cut by loading screens. For example, the first quest for the Imperial Guards. Before, you had the briefing, then a loading screen when you went to the site of battle, and then another when you get back. Apart from the loading screens, there was a small "hang" when the levels loaded all the textures and models on it, which looked VERY bad. Now the whole sequence plays out smoothly, with a nice fadeout between them and no hangs of any kind.

We also made some performance improvements to the game, reducing the number of individual objects and replacing them with instanced ones. For example, every tree in the level was an individual object, that brought down the performance of the game. Now, we are using a "forest brush" that instances all of them, netting us a 15% fps improvement. We are doing this with several repeating objects, improving the performance of the game quite a bit.

Visually the game is looking really nice. The town of Teron looks very cool as a "single" place. The outskirts are in the same level, but in "invisible" places. We've replaced some very old vegetation models, and optimized many other models for better performance. We have the artist who made the portraits improving the GUI, and we are also improving it's functionality (better support for higher resolutions and different ratios, more viewing space and information, more customizable). We will show you how it looks soon (probably in next months update).
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